That’s Amore

“To Rome with Love.”

Woody Allen’s film tells four stories—in English and Italian.Credit Illustration by Jonas Bergstrand

Woody Allen’s new movie, “To Rome with Love,” is light and fast, with some of the sharpest dialogue and acting that he’s put on the screen in years. The picture, a Roman idyll, gently but surely moves back and forth between romantic comedy and satirical farce. We’re in the realm of miraculous transformation—transformation through sex, ambition, chance, and fame that suddenly and unaccountably lands on someone’s shoulders like a ton of baked lasagna. There are thirteen major characters and several minor ones—Americans and Italians mixing it up on the streets and in hotel beds. The action is kaleidoscopic yet never rushed or scattered, and the movie, down to the smallest scene, hangs together thematically. Allen, now seventy-six, revises some of his old ideas and devices, but he’s not a man given to summing up; he keeps moving ahead. He appears in the film, as a grouchily retired opera director, and Judy Davis, who plays his psychiatrist wife, says to him, “You equate retirement with death.” That sounds about right. “To Rome with Love” is an old man’s rejection of mortality.

For a long time, after the early slapstick comedies, Allen’s movies hardly left the Upper East Side. The Brooklyn boy had triumphed in Manhattan, and he turned its tree-lined side streets, with their attendant muses—Gershwin and Porter, Ellington and Armstrong—into an achieved grail of success, taste, and artistic harmony. The Upper East Side was the great good place. His city dwellers may have decamped for the country at times, and Atlantic City turned up for parts of “Sweet and Lowdown,” but the suburbs, the Midwest, and California (except for brief, uncomfortable trips in “Annie Hall”) might never have existed.

In recent years, funding from overseas and perhaps a late surge of curiosity have brought Allen to Europe. The London films—“Match Point,” “Scoop,” “Cassandra’s Dream,” and “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”—taking their tone from that city’s gray light, are intelligent, critical, and cold, even bitter. But Allen’s time on the Continent has produced a warmer, more accepting mood. Wide-eyed, eager to take everything in, he has become a passionate pilgrim, a belated college junior looking for adventure and art. In “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” the city possesses a grave and quiet beauty. In a park, at night, everyone listens as a serious fellow plays Albéniz on the guitar. The mood is awed, as if no American had ever noticed Spanish classicism before. In “Midnight in Paris,” Allen devoted himself to the romance of culture, with an aesthetically flamboyant fantasia of American expats in the nineteen-twenties. The thinness of the movie’s conceits put some viewers off, yet the hunger for a superb moment in the arts suggested what Allen’s ambitions—by his own lights unfulfilled—were for himself.

“To Rome with Love,” a stronger film, is set in the present. The cinematographer Darius Khondji floods the screen with the mellow ochre tones of the vast squares caught in the late afternoon sun, and the dark greens of Trastevere’s narrow, leafy streets. In the movie, people keep exclaiming things like “Look at this city!,” and Allen and Khondji look again and again, pulling off, for instance, a circular pan around the Piazza del Popolo, past churches and monuments, moving back to a young woman who is lost. But she’s not really lost; she’s free—something that becomes clear when she drops her cell phone through a street grate and talks to strangers. Freedom means that you can’t be summoned.

A genial traffic cop, standing on a pedestal in the Piazza Venezia, introduces the characters: the opera director and his wife; a newlywed couple from the provinces (Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi) just arriving in Rome; a well-known American architect (Alec Baldwin) on vacation; an ordinary middle-class Roman (Roberto Benigni) living with his family. New characters are added, and we puzzle over the possible connections among the narratives, but, unusually for Allen, there aren’t any. The tales don’t even take place in the same time frame. What happens to the young couple unfolds in a day; the other stories stretch into weeks. And long scenes—and two entire narratives—are played in Italian. Yet the moods and the elements of the visual scheme—the lighter and darker shades of gold, indoors and out—are matched so elegantly that the transitions feel effortless, seamless. What holds the pieces together formally is the idea of seizing the moment, the magic you make for yourself by not being afraid.

The young couple get separated. The man, his hair combed over his forehead, prim, nervous about everything, falls into the expert hands of a call girl (Penélope Cruz, pouring into and out of a red dress). His wife, a radiant beauty, meets a movie star—he’s not an attractive man (he looks like Mussolini), but, for her, he’s a suavely overpowering seducer. She’s at the beginning of her life. Baldwin’s architect, who is successful but not content, can see ahead to the end. To recapture his youth, he walks around Trastevere, and meets an early version of himself—an architecture student ( Jesse Eisenberg), who takes him home to meet his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig). They are joined by an unemployed American actress (Ellen Page), who rapidly pulls the young man away from his girl. If everyone in the movie has a chance at transcendence of one sort or another, the actress transcends herself through sheer aggressive narcissism. She tries on soulful moods, quotes famous lines of poetry (she’s a line-dropper), adopts attitudes of despair and desolation. Page gives a restrained but brilliantly satirical performance as an intellectual and emotional faker. She’s one of the greatest of Allen’s female creations.

Allen brings both order and variety to the material by multiplying similar story elements. There’s a quartet of seducers, repeated scenes of strangers breaking in on a couple in bed, and a variety of men who regret what they haven’t accomplished—not just the architect but also Allen’s opera director, a man whose avant-garde productions were “ahead of their time” (i.e., failures). In Rome, his daughter (Alison Pill) is engaged to a handsome, earnest, left-wing lawyer (Flavio Parenti), whose father (Fabio Armiliato), a mortician by trade and another of the frustrated men, sings Puccini magnificently when he’s soaping himself in the shower. (Armiliato is a tenor who has performed at La Scala and the Met.) For the opera director, the father’s voice, overheard from the living room, is a revelation. Rising from a self-pitying funk, he becomes indomitable, and decides to promote the tenorizing mortician. The trouble is that the man sings well only in the shower. So the shower it will be. The idea leaps into nutty showmanship, which is both hilarious and possibly a metaphor for Allen’s own life: exploiting his own confinements (Brooklyn obscurity, shrimpy size, neurotic fearfulness, etc.), he launched a tremendous career.

The others seize opportunity when it beckons, but Benigni’s middle-class man is passively overwhelmed by it. On his way to work, he is mysteriously assaulted by reporters and paparazzi, then rushed off to a TV studio, where his shaving habits and his preferences at breakfast (buttered toast) are solemnly reported for millions of viewers. Allen is redoing as surreal farce his old distaste for the invasive idiocy of fandom (which he skewered in “Stardust Memories”) and his amazement at the universal longing for an instant in the media lights (“Celebrity”). Those two movies were sour and censorious, but this time Allen creates an exuberant spoof—no reason is ever given for Benigni’s fate. Yet it’s the right outraged tone for the age of Snooki. The Benigni episodes are also Allen’s way of saluting Fellini, who, fifty years ago in Rome, first dramatized the circus of modern publicity. But Allen’s feelings are now mixed: without sudden fame, the mortician wouldn’t have any fame at all, and Allen’s conclusion (it feels like a confession) is that it’s better, after all, to know a small amount of celebrity.

All this is worked out with masterly ease. The camera glides in, pulls back, remains flexible and fluid. “To Rome with Love” is devoted to dreamers and seekers. As Ellen Page works her dishonest magic on Jesse Eisenberg, Alec Baldwin passes into Eisenberg’s unconscious, hanging around and criticizing, whispering nasty (and accurate) advice. But his words don’t matter: Eisenberg falls in love anyway. Allen is suggesting that narcissists are so powerfully appealing because you feel blessed when, even momentarily, the beam of their self-love turns toward you. In “To Rome with Love,” no one is destroyed by hooking up with the wrong person. Some lives are altered; some couples split up, others go back to their original partners and embrace their old existence again. The only crime imaginable in this benevolent movie is the unwillingness to take a chance. ♦

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